Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data may be stored persistently on/in storage devices that may include hard drives. Typically, storage device drivers associated with these storage devices may organize or allocate fixed-sized blocks of persistent storage via use of a one-dimensional, linear block indexing model such as a dense integer index. A dense integer index has been one of the more common ways to allocate a block of persistent storage for smaller file systems or data centers that may include one or only a few hard drives. One type of dense integer index that was developed several years ago for these smaller file systems is known as Logical Block Addressing (LBA).
Recently, as larger file-systems or data centers having an increasing number of disk drives became more common, continued use of dense integer indexes such as LBA are beginning to have increasingly negative effects on data integrity, reliability and management overhead costs. These negative effects, for example, may have been caused by a lack of flexibility associated with a dense integer index that uses fixed-sized blocks of persistent storage that may have been allocated using an index designed for much smaller data systems. Thus, as the number of hard drives and the number of possible blocks of persistent storage maintained at a data center increased, the chances that some identifiers may match or collide also increased. As a result of large data centers, management overhead costs and system complexity have both increased in order to prevent collisions and maintain data integrity.